Brain, genetic studies shed light on stuttering

‘… “For a long time, stuttering
was thought to be psychogenic, rooted purely in psychology,” says
Allen Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders. “That’s clearly not the case now.”

Genetic quirk? Now the focus is on genes and the inner workings of
the brain. Investigators announced last November at the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association meeting that they had found the
first tangible evidence of a genetic aberration underlying at least some
cases of stuttering. What’s more, new PET imaging studies have
revealed striking differences in the brain physiology of stutterers and
nonstutterers. Stutterers, it turns out, may be using the wrong side of
their brains when they speak. “The right hemisphere seems to be
interrupting or interfering with the left hemisphere,” says Peter Fox,
neurologist and director of research imaging at the University of Texas
Health Science Center.

The new findings don’t mean that the crushing anxiety many stutterers
feel has nothing to do with their affliction. But researchers now suspect
that psychological factors, such as nervousness and stress, are not the
starting point; instead they “aggravate, exacerbate, and perpetuate,”
says Edward Conture, professor of hearing and speech sciences at
Vanderbilt University. A neurological mishap may cause a person to
stutter on a word for the first time; later the stutterer might remember the
embarrassing experience, making him more likely to stumble over the
word again.’

And writer Edward Hoagland’s memoir of his lofelong struggle with stuttering:

Stuttering is like trying to run with loops of rope around your feet. And
yet you feel that you do want to run because you may get more words
out that way before you trip: an impulse you resist so other people won’t
tell you to “calm down” and “relax.” Because they themselves may
stammer a little bit when jittery or embarrassed, it’s hard for a real
stutterer like me to convince a new acquaintance that we aren’t
perpetually in such a nervous state and that it’s quite normal for us to be
at the mercy of strangers. Strangers are usually civilized, once the
rough and sometimes inadvertently hurtful process of recognizing what
is wrong with us is over (that we’re not laughing, hiccuping, coughing, or
whatever) and in a way we plumb them for traces of schadenfreude. A
stutterer knows who the good guys are in any crowded room, as well as
the location of each mocking gleam, and even the St. Francis type, who
will wait until he thinks nobody is looking to wipe a fleck of spittle off his
face.

I’ve stuttered for more than 60 years, and the mysteries of the
encumbrance still catch me up…” U.S.News [via higgy]